Published On: July 19th, 20245 min read

The current way of managing technical debt

In the fast-paced world of software development, technical debt is an inevitable challenge that development teams face daily. It refers to the implied cost of additional rework caused when developers opt for quick, easy workarounds instead of more robust, well-architected ones. As developers rush to ship new features, known imperfections in the code are often overlooked to meet tight deadlines. However, this strategy becomes costly over time, leading to a higher total cost of ownership, increasing difficulty in application maintenance,  reduced agility, negative customer experiences, and poor security outcomes.

What are the Categories of Technical Debt?

Technical debt manifests in various forms, each carrying unique challenges and implications. These types of debt often accumulate due to rushed development, insufficient resources, prioritizing short-term gains over long-term sustainability, or simply just legacy applications and systems that never got upgraded due to the lack of budget or interest. Understanding these categories helps us address them more effectively and prevent their detrimental impact on the software development lifecycle.

  • Design & Architecture Debt: Suboptimal architectural decisions that limit scalability and performance.
  • Code Debt: Poorly written or overly complex code that’s difficult to understand and maintain.
  • Infrastructure Debt: Resulting from outdated infrastructure and inadequate DevSecOps processes.
  • Testing Debt: Insufficient testing that increases defect risks and reduces software reliability.
  • Documentation Debt: Lack of proper documentation hinders onboarding and knowledge transfer.

How to Move to a New Way of Managing Technical Debt?

Managing technical debt requires a structured approach that integrates seamlessly into the development lifecycle. The key components of this strategy should include:

  1. Craft a Comprehensive Plan

Implementing a comprehensive, well-rounded plan for managing and tracking technical debt involves systematically identifying, prioritizing, and addressing debt issues within regular development cycles. Continuous monitoring and periodic reviews ensure that debt is managed effectively, preventing it from accumulating unchecked.

The plan should consider systematically identifying and prioritizing debt issues, integrating their resolution into regular development cycles, and continuously monitoring progress. Regular retrospectives and feedback loops refine the process, balancing new feature development with debt management. Identifying technical debt involves recognizing areas in the codebase that hinder productivity and maintainability. Common indicators include complex and confusing code, frequent bugs, outdated dependencies, lack of sufficient test coverage, and inadequate documentation.

  • Complex and Confusing Codes indicate problems that are more likely to impact overall performance quality than cause a crash.
  • System or Product bugs that will cause an entire system crash.
  • Coding Standards and Coding style, which can be handled by developing a coding style guide and sticking to it.
  • Non-functional requirement (NFR) issues where the code violates an NFR constraint. This includes performance, security issues, unreliable code results, increasingly difficult-to-use, and loss of compatibility with other software or infrastructure.
  • Use labels like “technical debt” for categorization and prioritization.
  • Utilize issue boards to visualize the progress of debt-related tasks for effective sprint planning.
  1. Leverage the Latest Tools, Technologies, and Trends

Leveraging the latest tools, technologies, and techniques, we provide tailored solutions to address various categories of technical debt, including design, code, infrastructure, testing, and documentation debt. These cutting-edge resources ensure efficient identification, prioritization, and resolution of debt issues, ultimately enhancing overall code quality and maintainability. Some of the techniques that you can follow include:

  • Intelligent Code Review: Utilize large language models (LLMs) to automatically detect potential issues, suggest improvements, and provide contextual feedback, enhancing the efficiency and consistency of code reviews.
  • Code Summarization & Explanation: LLMs generate human-readable summaries of complex code segments, aiding developers in understanding and maintaining codebases.
  • Automated Refactoring: Conduct real-time analysis to identify code smells and inefficiencies, offering automated refactoring actions for better code quality.
  • Automated code security management to identify and remediate vulnerabilities: Apply modern application security tools that not only scan code for security vulnerabilities, but also provides recommendations or even new code to allow developers to fix security issues effectively.
  • Intelligent Code Fix: Propose solutions for common coding issues and vulnerabilities, streamlining error resolution and enhancing overall code quality and security.
  • Metrics and Monitoring: Use custom dashboards to track metrics such as code complexity, test coverage, and debt-related issues. Schedule regular code audits to assess and reprioritize debt-related tasks.
  1. Employ Human-centred Approach

Empower developers to view technical debt as a critical consideration from the outset, integrating its management into the architecture and design phases. This proactive strategy ensures that addressing technical debt becomes a core element of the development process rather than an afterthought.

  1. Address Organizational Cultural Change

Fostering a cultural change within the organization involves promoting awareness and responsibility for managing technical debt at all levels, encouraging collaboration, and prioritizing long-term code health. This shift ensures that technical debt management becomes ingrained in the organization’s values, operation plans, and application management cadence. Develop and enforce code review guidelines to emphasize quality and adherence to best practices. Perform automated code quality checks during merge requests to identify and address potential issues early.

Conclusion

Technical debt becomes more costly the longer it’s unaddressed. By minimizing technical debt, teams can reduce risk, enhance agility, and deliver higher-quality results. Managing technical debt is an ongoing process that requires vigilance, prioritization, and collaboration. Our Intelligent Software Factory provides comprehensive tools and features that significantly aid in this effort. By leveraging code reviews, issue tracking, CI/CD pipelines, documentation, and metrics, teams can systematically identify, monitor, and mitigate technical debt, ensuring the long-term success and sustainability of software projects. Embracing these best practices enhances code quality and maintainability, laying the foundation for continuous innovation and improvement in software development.